Poppy Day

by Amanda Prowse

  Poppy watched, fascinated, as the trembling photographer tried to coerce the reluctant wedding party onto the steps for a group shot. Courtney removed her fag and held it aloft as her numerous children bunched around her legs. She drew breath and bellowed towards the car park, ‘Darren get over ’ere, you fucking idiot!’

  It made Poppy cringe, it made her sad. The diminutive Darren with his shaved head and twinkling diamond earring, ambled over at his future wife’s behest. His hands thrust deep into too-shallow pockets, shoulders hunched forward accentuating the tight fit of his jacket and a thin, hand-rolled cigarette dangling unlit from his bottom lip. He looked beaten. She couldn’t see a happy ending for Courtney and Darren, who even on this their ‘Special Day’ appeared steeped in abject misery. They looked utterly disappointed and angry as though they had hoped for a small reprieve from their wretched lives for twenty-four hours. They had probably assumed that as this was their ‘Special Day’ they would feel special, but the fact was their lives were still crap. The only difference was that today they were crap in a hired suit and a second-hand frock.

  For Poppy Day, there was no church, choir or vicar, no flash dress, bridesmaids or flowers, no real reception, wedding cake or confetti, no floating down the aisle with piped music among bunched lilies and trailing ivy, no veil, no dad to give her away, no dad full stop. No honeymoon somewhere hot with terribly good food, no photos capturing the ‘essence of their nuptials’, none of those things. Oh and no mum, but that’s a story in itself. Instead, it was twenty minutes of laughter, a pint in the pub with their mates who sang ‘ta da da da…’ repeatedly to the tune of ‘Here comes the bride’ as they arrived, then home to bed.

  Poppy phoned her mum a few weeks before the wedding. The handset that reunited them across the miles was slippery in her sweating palm.

  ‘’ello, love.’

  Poppy could tell that she was lighting a cigarette as she was speaking. It was that particular talking out of the side of the mouth voice with teeth clenched as she sparked the flint into action.

  ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  Poppy did know. It was for Cheryl another disappointing venture that had promised gold dust and delivered sawdust. Another bloke that had promised her paradise and for the first few weeks had seemed like a prince as he wined, dined and snogged the face off her, but what do you know? Shock! Horror! Gasp! He turned out to be a fat, balding cretin, once she stayed sober long enough to realise. Yet again she found herself shackled to a loser cast from the same mould as all the others, in a downmarket beach resort. After a few drinks, her new home looked like the Caribbean, but on a rainy Tuesday with no money or friends, it might as well have been Blackpool. At least in Blackpool, Cheryl could have got a decent cup of tea and chatted to the locals.

  ‘I’ve got some news, Mum.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Whether Poppy was about to announce a terminal illness or a big lottery win, her mum couldn’t have cared less. Actually, that wasn’t true; a big lottery win would probably be the one thing to grab her interest.

  ‘Mart and I are getting married!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In about four weeks’ time.’

  ‘Not when’s the wedding. When are you due?’

  ‘Due for what?’

  ‘The baby! You silly cow!’

  It took Poppy a while to follow her train of thought, or lack of it. Luckily, her life with Dorothea meant she was well practised in drawing threads from incoherent rubbish and turning it into something recognisable. ‘There is no baby.’ Poppy bit down on her bottom lip and avoided the temptation to add ‘you silly cow.’

  ‘No baby?’

  ‘No baby.’

  ‘Well thank Christ for that! I can just see Terry’s face when I told him he was shagging a granny!’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Why are you getting married then?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yeah, well I mean if there is no baby…’

  ‘Because we love each other, Mum, and that’s what people in love do. Well, it’s what we want to do.’

  ‘But Martin Cricket…’

  Poppy felt her hackles rise, putting her instantly in defensive mode. ‘What about Martin Cricket?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, babes. He’s not exactly going to set the world on fire, is he?’

  Poppy didn’t answer. She knew that if she started on how he loved her, looked after her and always had, it might escalate into how her mum didn’t and hadn’t. Poppy avoided those conversations at all costs; it was better for everyone like that.

  Cheryl squealed suddenly, ‘Ooh Poppy! I bought a lovely turquoise chiffon frock with a matching coat that will be perfect with the right jewellery!’

  Poppy smiled at the first hint of enthusiasm in her mum’s voice, deciding to ignore the fact that this energy had been reserved for discussing clothes and not her forthcoming marriage. She was going to be there and that was something. ‘So you’ll come then?’ she tried not to sound too surprised or hopeful.

  ‘It’s my little girl’s wedding, my baby’s big day! Of course I’ll come. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

  Poppy beamed down the phone, inexplicably delighted. It would be nice for her nan to have her there.

  ‘I’d like to help out moneywise but…’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum; it’s all been taken care of.’

  It wasn’t until the day after the wedding that Poppy remembered her mum, realising at the same time that she hadn’t been there. Jenna, en route to the registry office, had spotted her outside a pub off the precinct. It had been some years since she’d seen her and she was shocked by Cheryl’s reed-thin figure, indicative of a body sustained by alcoholic fumes and liquid calories. A turquoise coat hung on her depleted frame. Emaciated ankles teetered and slid inside white patent leather heels. A gold handbag with an ornate clasp, the kind that made a satisfying audible snap when closed, banged against her bony hip. She was with a couple of blokes from the market. All three were paralytic, unable to talk or apparently stand as they slid down the wall, ending up as a heap of entwined limbs. Cheryl’s frothy, pale blue creation covered them all and one of her drunken chums sported a feathered hat of similar colour, sitting askew his lolling head.

  At the time, Poppy didn’t know whether to find it sad or funny that her mum managed to get all the way from Lanzabloodygrotty to London, but was then so distracted by a bottle of vodka that she couldn’t make the last five hundred yards to the service or reception. She now thought it was sad, not funny. Not funny at all.

  As she arranged the cushions on the sofa, the doorbell rang. Poppy could hear Jenna’s loud, off-key singing before she saw her. She slid the chain. Her friend didn’t wait for an invite; they were years beyond that. Jenna pushed past her, casually planting a kiss on her face between lyrics. She skipped into the kitchen and proceeded to fill the kettle. Poppy stood in the hallway, unmoving. ‘SOS’, the Abba song of choice, was being belted from the kitchen.

  ‘When you’re gone, though I try, how can I carry on? When you’re gone, how can I even try to go on…?’ Jenna danced back down the hallway until she stood in front of her friend. She sang into a wooden spoon that usually sat in a ceramic storage jar shaped like a chicken, next to the back of the cooker. She was singing, laughing and waiting for Poppy to join in, but she didn’t. Jenna stopped abruptly. Poppy’s expression and lack of enthusiasm for the performance told her that something was not quite right. ‘What’s wrong, babes? Wha’samatter?’

  Poppy shook her head; once again her tears pooled. Jenna’s anxiety levels rose almost instantly. It wasn’t like Poppy to behave in this way, especially when there was the opportunity to indulge in a spot of hairbrush karaoke. She would usually lead the singing and then jump into an impromptu dance routine, but not today. The longer she was silent, the more panic set in. It became tangible, swirling around, cocooning the girls in a mist of impatience and anxiety that prompted Jenna
to start guessing.

  ‘Is it Dorothea?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Your mum?’

  Poppy smiled as if to say, what on earth could have happened to her that would bother me? ‘No.’

  There was a moment of hesitation while Jenna considered the other, more obvious option. She placed her hand on her best friend’s arm, ‘Poppy, is it Mart?’

  Poppy looked at her mate’s face, etched with the worry of someone that loved her and was hurting to see her hurt. She nodded.

  Jenna swooped forward, enveloping Poppy in her arms; her tears were instant and sincere.

  ‘Oh my God, Poppy, no! Oh Poppy, is he dead?’

  Poppy’s words were muffled against her friend’s shoulder. She answered as truthfully as she could, ‘I don’t know.’ It made her tears fall harder and quicker. The two stood in the hallway, unmoving; each trying to decide what to do next.

  ‘Come and sit down, baby.’ Jenna somehow corralled her mate into the lounge, depositing her on the newly plumped cushions. She sat on the floor at her feet. In fact, Jenna was on her feet, firmly anchoring her; Poppy didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  ‘Tell me everything, Poppy. You know that I’m here for you, right?’ Jenna used her mummy voice, the one she had soothed Poppy with countless times over the years, even when they were both too young to recognise the role that she was adopting.

  ‘I had a visit yesterday from two soldiers. They told me that Mart was missing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me? I’d have come straight over; I hate to think of you on your own…’

  Poppy looked at Jen. Why hadn’t she called? It was hard to phrase her need for isolation.

  Jenna didn’t wait for a response before launching her next question, ‘What does that mean “missing”? They can’t have lost him.’

  Poppy smiled at her. ‘Actually they have lost him, kind of. When they first told me I thought that they meant he was dead and that they hadn’t found his body or identified him, or something.’

  She was again interrupted by Jenna’s tears, loud and messy, ‘Oh Poppy, poor you, poor Mart!’

  Poppy patted the back of her hand. ‘Then when I was at work…’

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe she made you go into work, after what you had been through! I’m going to sort that Christine out, she is such a cow!’

  ‘It’s all right Jen, I didn’t tell her, she doesn’t know.’ Jenna’s loyalty was fierce, her indignation no matter how misplaced, touching. ‘Anyway, I was doing Mrs Newton’s hair and I suddenly got this really strong image in my head of Mart. I know how crazy it sounds, but it was like I was watching it on a film, only I could hear and “feel” what he was going through. I knew that he had been taken.’

  ‘What do you mean “taken”? Taken where?’ Jenna tried to make sense of it.

  ‘Taken as in captured. Taken hostage.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Jenna placed both hands over her open mouth. She had no verbal braking system, no means of censoring what was floating around in her head. ‘Oh Poppy! That’s terrible, it’s just like that Terry Waite bloke from Blackheath. They chained him to a radiator for years and wouldn’t let him look at a Bible even though he was a vicar. His teeth went bad and when he got rescued he had to get full dentures. That bloke that was with him, John someone, his girlfriend chucked him when he came home, which was really shit. Not that you’d chuck Mart just because he got all beardy and scabby and he wouldn’t want to look at a Bible, but it’ll kill him not to know how Spurs are doing.’

  Poppy smiled at Jenna, rambling through her tears. She tried to think of Martin tied to a radiator like Terry Waite, who she knew was not a vicar, but a special envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but decided against trying to explain this to Jen. Poppy tried to apply reason. ‘Mart’s a different kettle of fish, Jen. He’s not a vicar and he won’t be gone for years.’

  Jenna looked at her. ‘Oh God, did I say the wrong thing? Truth is, mate, I don’t know what to say…’

  ‘This is a weird situation, Jen; it’s OK to say whatever you want. We don’t know how we should act, do we? It’s all new, strange and bloody awful.’

  ‘It is bloody awful, really bloody awful,’ Jenna concurred. They were silent for some seconds. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘I don’t really know. They have assigned me a liaison officer, a bloke called Rob who is coming to see me later, hopefully with more information. They seem good at keeping me up to date, so I guess we will just have to wait and see.’ Poppy decided against telling her that they knew who had Martin and that one of his colleagues had been killed, it wouldn’t have served any purpose other than upset her more; give her more to think about.

  Jenna looked at her mate. ‘Have you got dental insurance, Pop?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For Mart’s dentures, they can be really expensive.’

  Poppy laughed because the alternative was to cry some more. She knew there were going to be a lot more tears to come.

  Jenna’s tone was one of concern, ‘What are you going to do?’

  Poppy didn’t know how to answer her. What could she do? It was during these early chats that ideas started to germinate. Poppy tried to order her thoughts, attempting to take more mental control which, even if it achieved nothing, made her feel much better.

  ‘Are they going to rescue him?’

  It was a simple enough question but one to which Poppy didn’t know the answer. ‘I assume so, Jen. I mean they wouldn’t just leave him there, would they?’

  The two looked blankly at each other. Would they? She reminded herself to ask Rob exactly what the plan was for getting Martin out of there.

  Jenna chewed her bottom lip as she did when she was thinking, before shrieking, ‘Oh my God! I think it’s on the news, Poppy.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘About Mart.’

  ‘What about Mart?’ Poppy recalled Rob’s words; twenty-four-hour news blackout, but the media were already on it.

  ‘Well, not exactly about Mart, because I didn’t know that it was Mart, but I heard something on Sky this morning. I didn’t pay it much attention.’ Jenna, like most of the population, was emotionally saturated when it came to soldier deaths, which were too numerous to mentally invest in. It would only be the immediate family that felt their world torn apart. For many, it was simply the third headline after celebrity misdemeanour and the showbiz of politics.

  Poppy jumped up and switched on the TV. She punched the digits into the remote control and waited for the screen to flicker to life. There was an item about falling house prices, a celebrity’s frock had fallen off during an award ceremony, followed by a piece about the Bank of England’s decision to cut interest rates. The girls watched in silence, waiting.

  Then POW! It came on the screen. Poppy felt her heartbeat quicken. The girls edged closer to the TV, keen to note each small detail, hear every word. Ordinarily, sitting ten feet away from the telly with the volume turned up was enough to glean all you needed, but not today. There was a small photograph on the top right-hand of the screen; a young, smiling soldier in his uniform. It was Aaron Sotherby, the same Aaron Sotherby that had his breakfast, shaved and dressed with Poppy’s husband only a day or so before.

  The news wasn’t that detailed. It gave his age and stated that he’d been with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment for eighteen months; this was his first tour, he left behind a wife and a little boy of two. The way that they said ‘left behind’ made it sound as if he had gone by choice; Poppy didn’t like it. She pictured Aaron’s wife sat on a sofa, probably with her family around, her little boy close, wondering why she had been left behind.

  Poppy couldn’t decide whether it was better or worse to have a little boy in the world with no daddy. She thought of having a little boy sat by her side right now, and decided that it was definitely better.

  She was considering this when the voice on the TV seemed to boom, ‘During the incident in which Private Sot
herby was killed, another soldier from the same unit is believed to have been taken hostage by an, as yet, unnamed group. There have been no demands made for his release. His family have been informed. We will give you any details as and when they come in…’ The newsreader turned his frown into a smile and it was off to a film set in Elstree and an item on the latest 007 movie.

  It felt bizarre, knowing it was Martin they were speaking about, and even weirder that she was ‘the family’ to which they referred. She knew they said that to stop the thousands of other army families worrying. By the time it hit the TV, you would already have been informed. Poppy felt a combination of distress and excitement. She didn’t want to be in this awful situation, but at the same time it was a bit like, ‘Wahey! We are on the telly!’

  ‘Shit, Poppy!’ Jenna’s succinct appraisal accurately summed up the situation.

  The two continued to gaze at the box, waiting for it to be played again, desperate to see if they’d missed anything. It was shown once more before the doorbell rang. Poppy was relieved by Rob’s arrival. She and Jenna had talked themselves around in circles, fuelled by caffeine. Poppy felt shaky and sick. Whilst it was lovely to have company, she also wanted her friend to leave so that she could figure out what needed to be done. The reality was, however, that there was nothing to be done; only more waiting.

  Jenna scowled at Rob as their paths crossed in the hallway; she too wanted someone to blame. Poppy thought it funny that her environment was subject to such extremes, silent and morgue-like when she was alone or bustling with activity. She tried to remember what it felt like when it was her and Martin; normal.

  ‘How are you today, Poppy?’

  ‘OK, I think. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Ooh yes, lovely.’ Rob removed his cap and leant against the kitchen cabinet.

  Poppy was grateful he didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with small talk, happy that they both had thinking time. It made her relax. ‘I’ve seen the news, Rob.’ She decided to preempt his question.